Week 2

June 13

And so begins another week of class. Today in Spanish we went over a lot of vocab and discussed how many of our favorite idioms in English don’t translate. I’ll spare the details but just know that all were amused by both question and answer. Lunch consisted of a favorite of Americans and Costa Ricans alike- KFC! I don’t know why but they’re everywhere down here. They easily outnumber McDonalds. Anjuli, Arielle, Liz, Caitlin, and I split an 8 piece bucket biscuits, corn on the cob and drinks for all for $4 each so about the same price as home. We returned to school for a review lecture on equipment we encountered in the hospitals during our visits on Friday. Rick went over ECGs, gastroscopes, laproscopes, portable x-rays and defibrillators before we went to lab to troubleshoot our power supplies. After spending about an hour trying to figure out why our capacitor kept heating up and almost all afternoon today, we discovered that our diodes were oriented in a way that had our negative and positive charges going opposite of how we designed our circuit. We maintained this reversed orientation all the way until the final capacitor which we placed in based on design instead of going off of the previous elements. Luckily, the capacitor only leaked a little before we realized instead of shooting off and exploding. And the fix only required us to switch our wires at one location. Once we finished- finally- we headed home to update our respective blogs, work on homework. Dinner consisted of barbecue drumsticks, salad, rice and beans with a fresh fruit juice whose name is lost on me… But now on to the homework I’ve put off! Adios America.

June 14

Staying up until 12 was a bad idea. The sun rises at 5am here and I struggle to convince myself to continue attempting sleep for even 1 extra hour. Spanish was a struggle today. It’s hard to try and grasp grammar rules when I barely understand them and the verb tenses in English. My head literally hurt from trying. Luckily Gladys is patient with us and our confusion since I was in good company. And then there was our discussion- today’s topic “what is the best way for EWH and America in general to help less developed countries”. It was a good discussion and on another day I would definitely have said more but after my struggle with grammar, all my energy went into just keeping up. For lunch I had, empanadas con carne y una banana- it cost $1.50. Engineering class at the siesta hour was difficult again but it went pretty well otherwise. Today we went over Anesthesia machines so their complexity offered plenty to think about and question. Lab today was more of a group discussion and activity as we discussed the potential difficulties and values of working in our hospitals. We also created quick start guides for various activities like how to braid, tie a bow line knot, make a fortune teller (a la 3^rd grade), and other fun things. Liz and I went to Giacomin for a chocolate fix and some time to do homework after lab. Of course I got a carchofo and also queque con crema de chocolate. Both were delicious. We made it home just in time to sit down to pork chops, gallo y pinto, and salad made by Julie. At dinner, we discussed the many ways to learn more Spanish, including reading a Spanish version of Cosmo; this should be interesting.